TOKYO/WASHINGTON -- Membership bids filed just days apart by Beijing and Taipei have turned the 11-nation CPTPP trade bloc into the latest flashpoint in the push to build a global, rules-based trade order.

Originally conceived to counter Beijing's growing economic clout in the Pacific Rim, the members of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership have been split in their response to the dueling bids. With the U.S. no longer part of the framework, Japan now faces a challenge

PALO ALTO, U.S. -- Honda Motor has agreed with Google to start installing the Android operating system next year in major models offered around the world, the search engine giant said Thursday, allowing services such as navigation and music playing to be offered without the use of a smartphone.

By tying up with the U.S. technology company, Honda aims to both increase customer convenience and reduce development costs.

Google's Android Automotive system, first introduced in 2015, has the same basic

TOKYO -- Japanese department store operator Takashimaya will team with 15 fashion brands to recycle used clothes to make brand-new apparel as it doubles down on sustainability efforts.

About 40 items will debut on Takashimaya's upscale stores and its online shop, with most of them sold in the same price range as conventional counterparts -- including a winter coat priced at about 60,000 yen ($547).

The move marks one of the first large-scale recycling collaborations between retailers

James Crabtree is executive director of IISS-Asia in Singapore. He is author of "The Billionaire Raj."

Leaders from the U.S., Japan, India and Australia face an unusual dilemma as they meet for the first in-person summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, in Washington this weekend: how rapidly should their Indo-Pacific grouping now move forward with plans to counter China?

In earlier incarnations, the Quad has tended to move forward only gradually, limited by its own internal divisions

TOKYO -- As tensions between China and Taiwan rise to the point of potential conflict, their bids to join the CPTPP trade deal will have both economic and security consequences.

If Beijing and Taipei bring their political feud to this venue, it will undermine the bloc's original role of providing transparent and fair trade rules. The dueling applications risk dividing the pact's 11 existing members, ultimately breaking down their united front.

To avoid this fate, countries in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership

TOKYO -- Andrew Barnes was not planning to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for his Australian workforce training startup, Go1, earlier this year. But when he began pitching to investors, he was overwhelmed with a flood of interest, including from a new candidate: SoftBank.

"When we saw that interest, and when we thought of the next five to 10 years plus, there's a very exciting market opportunity in the space in which we are operating," Barnes recalled in an interview.

Talks

TOKYO -- Clinical trials for a COVID-19 pill have kicked off across the world, as pharmaceutical companies work on a simpler and more affordable way to treat patients and help finally bring the pandemic under control.

U.S.-based Merck is working with startup Ridgeback Biotherapeutics on an oral antiviral treatment called molnupiravir. A final Phase 3 trial for the drug is currently being conducted worldwide, including in Japan, and its findings could become available as early as October.

Merck plans to seek emergency use authorization for

TOKYO -- A research team at Japan's Keio University has developed plastic optical fibers that can send information with few or no errors, with potential applications from data centers to self-driving cars.

Fiber-optic cables now used for high-speed data transmission are typically made with glass -- expensive, fragile and difficult to work with. There have been high hopes for plastic as an alternative, but plastic cables generate more error-causing noise that can delay transmission and use more energy.

The fiber developed by

Nina Xiang is the founder of China Money Network, a media platform tracking China's venture and tech sectors. She is the author of "US-China Tech War: What Chinese Tech History Reveals About Future Tech Rivalry."

Chinese President Xi Jinping and former U.S. President Ronald Reagan have at least one thing in common. Both leaders quoted ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu's well-known saying, "Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish."

Reagan spoke those words